Of Love And Other Demons

In my younger and more vulnerable years, as Scott Fitzgerald might say, my greatest fear was losing passion for the things I love: books, music,
nature. And I’ve always been afraid of losing touch wth my past, with the memories and events that shaped me, for better or worse, into the man I am today.

For it’s our passions (or lack thereof) that define us, giving us a sense of identity and creating the persona which we share with the world. For example, I have no idea where I would be, internally or otherwise, without my love of books and images and music–and how each of them, together or apart,form the passion which we call art. I am, for better or worse, an artistic person. And sometimes, when I’m very, very lucky, I even transcend my lack of natural talent.

For some reason, I no longer feel the keen sense of anguish that I once associated with the loss of loved ones, the good times, the endless summer of sweet childhood. I can feel that I’m growing older, losing touch with all that I have loved, becoming a different person somehow, and it pains me that there’s absolutely nothing that I can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about it at all.

I remember coming home from work one day in my early twenties and listening to one of my favorite albums. I couldn’t feel it as deeply then as I was accustomed to, and the prospect of losing touch with something I loved concerned me, disturbed me, frightened me. I wondered if I was still the same person that I always thought I was, a person who loved music and other artistic pursuits as much as life itself. For a while, at least, I was worried that I no longer knew myself. I felt lost, adrift, sightless, a person without a heart. And it has always been my heart at the, well, heart, of everything I do.

Needless to say, I was able to recapture the passion that I was afraid I had lost. Now, at the age I am now, I still worry that I don’t feel things as deeply as I used to. But I do still feel, I do still create, and maybe one day my dedication will allow me to truly transcend my limitations. Until then, I will search for love and inspiration in the most important parts of my life. And if I had to lose everything, everything except one quality, then I would definitely choose to keep love.

World Leader Pretend

The greatest fear of any writer? Being unable to write, of course. And though some have posed that Hemingway’s suicide was because of a loss of faculty, it’s Hemingway himself who wrote late in his life that the process is always there in the conscious mind, that”all you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written…it was good and severe discipline.

I’ve been thinking a lot, obviously, about the act and process of writing. I’ve been thinking about writing, I must admit, because I haven’t been doing very much of it for months now. I’ve been wondering if I can still write, and if I can, if what I write will be any good. I’ve been wondering if I still have a modicum of talent, if I’m still a writer at all.

Other needs have conspired, so to speak, to silence me. The fact that these needs are costly and destructive have done little to deter them. The fact that they have stalled a book-in-progress shames me, however, and hopefully will be one of the reasons (reasons, plural…it will require much help to get going again) that I will be able to once again call myself a writer. I’m facing a series of walls. But “it’s high time I raze the walls that I’ve constructed…”

*R.E.M., “World Leader Pretend”
1988 Nightgarden Music

“the last thing that you said as you were leaving…”

The morning I left Pennsylvania, I drove south without looking back. There was no final, bittersweet, last visit to the pub. There was no final walk through the town. There was no final look at the Penn State campus, with people just beginning to realize their dreams. There were no goodbyes; there was no one to say goodbye to. I left the same way I arrived: with a car full of books and clothes, and a mind full of hopes, ideas, ambitions, and dreams. I left with little; I left with the things I came with. I left with the things which can never be taken away.

So now I’m going back again
I got to get to her somehow
All the people we used to know
they’re an illusion to me now
some are mathematicians
some are carpenters wive’s
don’t know how it all got started
I don’t know what they’re doing with their lives
but me I’m still on the road
heading for another joint
we always did feel the same
we just saw it from a different point of view
tangled up in blue*

If you’re busy enough and manage to distract yourself enough, you can convince yourself that you’re not homesick and that you don’t miss the people that you love. At least, not that badly. There’s always a holiday coming up, some time off from work, a long weekend to look forward to. There’s always something to hold onto. But someday, no matter how strong you are, those dates on the calendar are no longer enough. You need to see them more often: the people that you love. And when it comes to children, you cannot help but wonder: do they still love you? I thought about that as I was leaving…and I realized that I just didn’t know.

I can’t remember the last thing you said as you were leaving
and the days go by so fast**

Through Maryland and West Virginia I wondered. As I finally entered Kentucky, I still wondered. I didn’t know if my sons would welcome me back to Lexington, or if they would view my return as another retreat and failure. But this time, I had a story to tell and a book to write, and it wasn’t going to be written in Pennsylvania. I was coming home with a purpose, and that, I hoped, they would understand. If I was to become the writer I always wanted to be, first I had to come home.

Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, wrote that distance is essential in writing of closely held emotions and experiences: “…in one place you could write about it better than in another. That was called transplanting yourself…and it could be as necessary with people as with other sorts of growing things.”

Substitute emotional distance for geographic distance, though, and you essentially accomplish the same thing. The key for any writer is maturity, perspective, and command of your material. That I have. So it really doesn’t matter if I write in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, or Katmandu. I remember the old question: who, after all, is a writer? One who writes…of course. We make this alchemy seem too complicated sometimes, I think. Words turn into pages turn into chapters into books. It’s not that difficult, is it?

No. It’s really not. And it’s much easier when you can simply drive across town and spend time with the people that you love.

*Bob Dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue” (from the album Blood On The Tracks)

**Counting Crows, “A Long December” (from the album Recovering the Satellites)

emotions in motion

There is no sense, I have come to learn, in writing from the heart unless you are also willing to write from the edge. Semantically, it might well seem that there’s little difference between the two, but the difference is between merely writing honestly and, as Annie Dillard wrote, the willingness and courage to:

…spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Something more will arise for later, something better.

I’ve thought often of those words since I bought Dillard’s The Writing Life on April 26, 1992, at the old and dearly missed Woodland Park Bookstore in Lexington (sort of a pack rat like Hemingway, I save everything). Writers, of course, love reading as much about the act of creation as we do the work itself. Writing, by necessity, is lonely work for loners, and it’s something of a comfort to learn how others face the same challenges. It’s a way to not feel so…alone.

But it is also the writer’s solemn duty to control his or her emotions. Tears after writing are good; tears before writing are the quickest means to the god-awful embarrassment of simply writing for therapy as opposed to creating some new and hopefully strange form of art. Keep the former efforts in your personal journal and burn or delete them when you realize how trite they actually are; as for the others, sow them among the world.

Hemingway, it’s said, rewrote the ending of A Farewell To Arms thirty-two times. And yes, there are the manuscripts to prove it (probably with the greatest collection of his manuscripts in the John F. Kennedy library in Boston). He was searching, as we all are, for the greatest emotional control and impact; and of course, he found it, as Frederic Henry leaves the hospital in a daze, Catherine and their baby never to join him in life.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain…

the writing life

Writers, it seems, sometimes like to read about the act of writing as much as we enjoy the alchemy itself. The image of a young Hemingway in Paris is part of my consciousness; many, many years ago, A Moveable Feast became my standard of how a writer should work and live.

It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait. The waiter brought it and I took out a notebook from the pocket of the coat and a pencil and started to write…

We know now that the mere act of sharpening pencils was part of Hemingway’s process for writing, a means to put himself in the right frame of mind for creating stories from memory and imagination. We each…procrastinate…a little before losing ourselves in the solitary and frequently frustrating act of writing. What writers don’t ordinarily admit, however, is that part of the delay is based on fear: fear that the writing won’t go well, that the feelings and stories we wish to express will evaporate before our eyes, that we lack the talent or vision to express what we secretly feel. Writing is a brave act, much more than what Fitzgerald wrote about “swimming underwater and holding your breath.” It’s an act of faith and hope and dreams, of laying your soul bare before the world. It’s a tightrope act, walking a wire without a net and never knowing if you’ll keep your balance or fall (and fail) in the attempt. It requires more than a little courage, not to mention the unshakable belief that the writer’s vision and belief is truly worth exploring. It’s not self-aggrandizement or justification;  it’s the eternal hope to make the reader feel, to touch someone’s heart and inspire that little glimmer of self-recognition in the stories we tell.

Annie Dillard, also, wrote eloquently of the process in her book The Writing Life:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time.

So, hold nothing back, then.  Something else, Dillard writes, will occur to you later. It always does, in one form or another. To be able to write it well, though, requires a form of concentration, talent, and a sense of hope and wonder that most persons do not possess. I make no claims to the talent part. But I have never, ever, given up this thing we refer to as hope.

lectio divina

The first time I saw a hummingbird, I was in church. Not in the sanctuary, actually, but upstairs in the annex at Sunday School. The morning was bright, lovely, and warm, and the hummingbird flitted just outside the open window. I was too young then to think of it as some kind of sign, but something stirred in my heart that I had never felt before. I learned something about beauty, then, and fragility, and the importance of keeping your eyes, mind, and heart open to all possibilities.

Those qualities are important, too, in the lifelong discipline of learning that we all share. I try very hard to keep my heart open whenever I learn by reading, which is why I’m not ashamed to admit that I often hurry to my computer, intent on notating a section of lovely prose or a lesson I’ve just learned. I’m not ashamed to admit that reading makes me feel excited and alive. Sometimes I read aloud just to hear the beauty of the words or to understand what I’ve just experienced; sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I even cry.

There’s a name for this sort of intense, fully immersed reading: lectio divina (spiritual reading). All reading is spiritual to me, because a book–if it’s any good–enters directly into the human heart. And there it remains, if you’re fortunate enough, to form the essence of the person you are continually becoming: the person you are destined to be.

Sometimes friends ask me how many books I’ve actually read. Truly, I’m not really sure: seven thousand? Ten thousand? I do know that at it’s peak, my library contained over 1,500 books. Many, far too many, are now gone in the chaos of the last two years. I probably have only a hundred or so with me now in Pennsylvania, but the good news is that I’m once again acquiring these treasures at a rate commensurate with my usual pace. Which means, of course, that I’m investing again: not only in books, but in my lifelong education. Little wonder, then, that I often refer to myself as an autodidact…self-taught. I’ve read less than some, more than some. But what I’ve read stays with me, affects me, shapes me. I feel every book I’ve ever read, no matter how long ago it was (some, of course, more than others). And these books, as Wendell Berry wrote, converse with each other as much as they converse with me. There’s an alchemy going on here inside my heart, filled with Robert Jordan and Jake Barnes and Brett Ashley and Daisy Buchanan and more characters than I possibly have space to name. They whisper to one another; they whisper to me. Soon others will join them, and the conversation will take on even more dimensions. In the meantime, I will keep reading. In the meantime, I will keep learning. I will never, ever, stop learning…

“beside the green apple sea”

Tonight I’m thinking about my many…faults. Last night at the bookstore I told a friend, “I  am a perfectly imperfect person.” I must have heard it or read it somewhere, as with so many of the words I live by. Sometimes I live behind the words of others; sometimes everything that I’ve read and heard and learned and lived with coalesces into something that, on my very best days, might pass for some sort of minor originality.

it’s 4:30 A.M. on a Tuesday
it doesn’t get much worse than this
in beds in little rooms in buildings in the middle
of these lives which are completely meaningless,
help me stay awake, I’m fallin
asleep in perfect blue buildings*

I am, after all this time, learning–especially about myself. I’m building a new life in a city where I know hardly anyone, and I can’t help but wonder: is this my fault, or is the task of finding true friends as difficult as it sometimes seems to be? Questions. There are always questions.

My poet says, and I have always tried to remember, “…have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”**

Patience, then. We must all be patient. I must be patient, as I am slowly and inevitably learning. I’m learning that my talents are somehow still intact, and I am learning that the writing I’m doing now is going well–even if some of it, as I noted elsewhere, is like Gertrude Stein’s admonition to Hemingway, inaccrochable. Which doesn’t mean the prose or the story is poor, of course. It’s just not something I can blog about. And besides, it’s for my book.

Did I mention that I’m learning to read again? I’m speaking, of course, of the kind of reading I used to do: ravenous and focused. Some of the books I’m turning to these days are old friends, while others of course are new. I’m still…learning…as always. I’m learning about my art and my strength (which I didn’t know I still have) and most of all, I’m learning about myself.

Thankfully, my latest lessons don’t involve a great deal of “fear and self-loathing.” I’m trying to be the artist I thought I could always be, and the kind, patient man I’ve always wanted to become. The work itself is unfinished, of course, will always be unfinished. I am unfinished, as we all are. And if you think about it, that’s the most important and pleasant answer that we can ever hope to have.

*Counting Crows, “Perfect Blue Buildings”
**Rilke, from Letters To A Young Poet

“borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

Not sleeping, except for an occasional and all-too-brief nap after work, has taught me a lot about endurance and perseverance.  As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’ve come to believe that reliability…answering the bell every day…is the most fundamental key to success (however you wish to define it).

Sleep deprivation, of course, is cumulative. Going for months (or in my case, years) on a couple hours sleep per day isn’t compensated by even a twelve-hour sleep fest. My body just…crashes…sometimes. I readily admit that. But day after day after day I’m in the office early, sometimes even after having worked in the middle of the night only a few hours before. Do my colleagues know that? Nah…but I know, and through determination and the sense of having to prove myself all over again, somehow the work gets done. I have something of a laser focus these days, and for that reason I’m doing my best work in years.

Somehow I just keep…going. Part of that is my love for what I do and the opportunity I now have; part of that is the resurgence of the ambition I once was known for. I am, as a friend recently said to me, somewhat of a victim of early success. In a small way, I look to my role models for precedents. Like Scott Fitzgerald publishing This Side Of Paradise at age 21, or John Lennon finishing with the Beatles at age 30, I enjoyed my own (admittedly minor) successes at a very young age. But life has a way of  bringing you back down to earth, and by now I’ve been humbled, hospitalized, forgotten, even ridiculed. But now I awake (well, when I do actually sleep) with a renewed sense of determination and purpose. I enjoy a wisdom that I’ve never known before, and I’m somewhat hellbent on not letting my family, my colleagues, or even myself down. Yes, I admit it: especially myself.

I remember a boy sitting at a glass-topped kitchen table in an apartment late one  night in Lexington, struggling to write a draft of a novel and listening to the rain through the open patio door. He was in love with someone with a musical, lilting, Appalachian-tinged voice; he was in love with books and writing and possibilities and especially life itself. Perhaps he was even a little in love with himself; it wouldn’t be the first time a young person had made that mistake.

Tonight the setting has changed and the boy has long since grown into a man (and hopefully a kind, thoughtful one at that). But the window is open again to the rain and “words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.”* I’m a little older now, and hopefully a little wiser. But inside me still is the boy who wants to write, to teach, to leave something of a legacy behind. “I’m looking back and I can’t see the past anymore,” Pete Townshend once wrote. For me, however, the past is ever-present…and I’m trying in my writing to make what sense of it that I can. As Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current,
borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

*The Beatles, “Across The Universe,” copyright Maclen Music/ATV Songs

facebook and the remembrance of things past…

We remember each other very vividly, or sometimes have trouble matching a name to a face. We’ve stayed in touch, or rediscovered old friends we thought we would never hear from again. Sometimes we strike up a new friendship that, for one reason or another, we never pursued back in the day. Occasionally, we welcome new friends into our social circle. Sometimes we even meet, to disappointment or unexpected pleasure. But most of all, we end up re-creating the community–at least in part–that we thought we had left behind forever.

Social scientists, I’m sure, will stay busy for years analyzing the impact of Facebook. In an article in The New York Times, Clive Thompson wrote about the “incessant online contact” of social networking sites:

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting.

This seems valid enough: those short status updates might not seem immediately significant, but they do reveal a person’s interests, intelligence, hopes, dreams, fears. In some ways you learn things about your friends (old and new) that wouldn’t otherwise be revealed in ordinary conversation. Sometimes you learn things you don’t want to know, although this happens more rarely than one might think. Most of all, you learn that you are part of a community–in some cases, a community that you didn’t even know existed.

Personally, I’ve come to view Facebook as sort of a lifeline to home. Living five hundred miles away, it oftentimes makes me feel a little less…lonely. And just like the Counting Crows song, “Someday I won’t be so lonely…and I’ll walk on water every chance I get.”

my heart is borne to melancholia…

On his solo album Mercury Falling, Sting writes that “everyone has to leave the darkness sometime.” For artists and intellectuals, however, the darkness is often where true brilliance and insight reside. Melancholia, it has long been known (and politely termed), is frequently the place from which creativity and originality flows. It doesn’t make it easy to live with, but it does offer some measure of hope and comfort to those of us who live with what modern medicine terms  ”depression.”

There is just something about looking inward–a must for any writer or artist–that makes us particularly prone to melancholia.

my cup is cold, my paper’s old
my heart is sold to melancholia
my clothes are torn, my shoes are worn
my heart is borne to melancholia*

Now this doesn’t mean, of course, that creative and intellectual persons are unable to laugh, feel joy, or any other of the positive emotions which enrich the human experience. But the beauty we see in this world literally takes our breath away–a sparkling, clear blue autumn sky, the stars on a dark winter night, leaves dappled in soft light, the smile on a small child’s face. These things make us smile; they make us happy. But along with that we also live with these constant reminders of the fragility and fleeting nature of God’s world; we live with this knowledge and the resulting melancholia.

Thankfully, this  ability to appreciate the beauty all around us is also sufficient inspiration to share what we see, feel, and experience with others. Sometimes it’s simply sharing…but in those rare moments we all long for, it becomes art.

So this weekend I will pack up my computer and head out to the bookstore or the coffee shop–my version of Hemingway sitting in a Paris cafe with his Moleskine journals and a freshly sharpened pencil. I will think, feel, and write…and I will gladly live with this thing called melancholia.

Pete Townshend, “Melancholia,” copyright Towser Tunes